If you’re still unsure whether the public cloud is the right option for you, speak with a professional cloud partner who will take a closer look to compare your requirements and business goals with your current IT landscape. You’ll get support in selecting a matching hosting model (for example, hybrid vs. public cloud only) and recommendations on the most optimal setup to minimize costs.

Moving to the public cloud doesn't mean compromising on tailored-made solutions or security. It requires good preparation and getting a solid understanding of available options. Once you take the first step on your cloud journey, you’ll benefit from a rapidly evolving ecosystem that will provide you with constant access to the latest technologies.

If you're hesitant about the best way to move forward, start with a short analysis of your current IT environment and business processes. Identify what needs to be changed, what functionalities you would like to keep and how you would define the minimum viable scope. You can begin with the following questions:

• What is our main goal? Reducing costs while keeping the same functionalities or innovation and business growth?
• What are our IT requirements resulting from our business objectives?
• Is the current IT infrastructure, which may have been set up a long time ago, still sufficient to support our business objectives?
• Could a cloud migration help us further develop our IT infrastructure?
• What functionalities would we like to keep in the future setup?
• How many redundancies could we eliminate through more streamlined processes offered by the cloud?
• Are we able to implement a cloud journey as a company, in terms of costs, personnel, education, and skills?

A preliminary assessment of your key objectives will make future strategy planning much easier. An experienced cloud expert can then help you translate these requirements into an actionable plan.

Financial implications of switching to the public cloud is the number one topic for businesses considering migrating. Start by analyzing current costs of usage and actual costs of your IT landscape, including: hardware costs, software costs, infrastructure maintenance, and support costs over a five-year timeframe. Before migrating to the cloud, the key factors influencing consumption costs will include:

- Compute usage and commitment options
- Storage and backup costs
- Licensing costs
- Management tools and governance
- Disaster recovery-related costs

More information on forecasting and optimizing cloud architecture can be found in this whitepaper discussing a sample SAP scenario: SAP on AWS: Optimize costs in 5 steps

The prerequisite for implementing a new cloud architecture is a well-outlined cloud strategy. Before the process is started, our experts will review your strategy documentation to ensure that nothing has been left out. Some of the key considerations at this stage can be summarized in the following questions:

• Does your cloud strategy consider potential future growth of your business or organizational changes?
• How can you ensure that your future cloud environment can scale quickly?
• What service provider and hosting model would suit your current environment best?
• How can you ensure that your cloud environment is well-architected?

Next, our experts will look at your requirements and create implementation concepts from the landing zone up to cloud governance.

Cloud optimization spans various facets of your environment: governance model, performance, reliability, security posture, costs, and sustainability. Yet, often, the most significant improvement potential lies in fundamental areas—your cloud infrastructure. As organizations scale and migrate more processes and workloads to the cloud, infrastructure may lag. This can lead to suboptimal business processes, inadequate cloud consumption practices, missed standardization and innovation opportunities. Oftentimes, limited in-house resources and knowledge of emerging technologies can also lead to companies not leveraging their Cloud Center of Excellence to its full capacity.

If you've had a cloud solution deployed for some time, seeking a second opinion from an external expert can provide a comprehensive assessment of your workloads and offer optimization recommendations. Syntax’s Well-Architected Review, for example, targets companies facing excessive costs, technical debt, or security gaps. For ongoing support beyond a one-time consultation, consider ongoing managed cloud services to take the burdens off of internal staff.

If you're hesitant about the best way to move forward, start with a short analysis of your current IT environment and business processes. Identify what needs to be changed, what functionalities you would like to keep and how you would define the minimum viable scope. You can begin with the following questions:

• What is our main goal? Reducing costs while keeping the same functionalities or innovation and business growth?
• What are our IT requirements resulting from our business objectives?
• Is the current IT infrastructure, which may have been set up a long time ago, still sufficient to support our business objectives?
• Could a cloud migration help us further develop our IT infrastructure?
• What functionalities would we like to keep in the future setup?
• How many redundancies could we eliminate through more streamlined processes offered by the cloud?
• Are we able to implement a cloud journey as a company, in terms of costs, personnel, education, and skills?

A preliminary assessment of your key objectives will make future strategy planning much easier. An experienced cloud expert can then help you translate these requirements into an actionable plan.

A well-outlined cloud strategy is the foundation of every successful cloud project. If you already have a general vision of what goals you would like to achieve through cloud transformation in your company or which bottlenecks you would like to eliminate from the current setup, it's time to dive deeper. Here are some areas that might require your further attention:

• Key metrics and KPIs: Do you have a complete list of the current metrics relevant to your business? What metrics are you planning to use to compare the performance of your current on-premises environment with the performance of your cloud architecture? (e.g.: revenue, savings, customer growth, cost per transaction, operational cost reduction, CAPEX, etc.)
• Detailed assessment of current applications: What tailor-made functionalities are you determined to keep? Did you map your current list of applications to the cloud solutions that will replace them?
• Cost optimization: Are you familiar with FinOps strategies and other measures that will allow you to reduce cloud infrastructure costs?
• Business growth: Are you planning to expand your business in the future? Are the solutions that you selected able to support new services or your growing customer database?
• Team empowerment: Have you identified relevant stakeholders that will support the cloud implementation in their respective departments? Have you planned trainings to educate employees in your organization about new processes and included the training costs in your calculations?
• Operational excellence: Use the tools and capacities of a hyperscaler to make your operations more predictive, reliable, and scalable, as well as decrease downtime / outages and carbon footprints.

If everything looks good so far, you are prepared for the first migration or to build the first cloud-based application. Gain experience and incorporate this into your future planning. If something doesn’t go as expected, analyze the reasons and get support for your next iteration.

You're on the right track! What has your experience been like so far? Do you feel confident in driving the way forward? If not, let someone help you eliminate the uncertainty, resolve any issues, and achieve your cloud goals with the appropriate speed for your upcoming projects and migrations.

We can check if your deployment follows best practices, focusing on areas such as:
- Cost optimization
- Security
- Resilience
- Sustainability

Learn more about the key elements of building a well-architected report here.

Hyperscalers offer innovative cloud solutions, but success hinges on fully leveraging them. Imagine a hyperscaler as a provider of Lego blocks. Your organization's challenges are akin to constructing the Eiffel Tower—a cohesive architecture integrating infrastructure and logistics for tourists and maintenance. This task grows complex when optimizing involves multiple hyperscalers, each offering tools or services requiring seamless integration. Without updated knowledge, certified staff, and multi-cloud expertise, managing such an infrastructure can be overwhelming.

Hyperscaler partners with multi-cloud expertise are adept at tackling these challenges. They continually seek new solutions, partner with hyperscaler experts, align with customer needs, track technical advancements, and ensure optimal architectures. Leveraging close relationships with hyperscalers, they help identify opportunities for innovation—such as AI, IoT, analytics, and DevOps roadmaps. When selecting a managed service provider, prioritize technical prowess and industry-specific knowledge. Choose a partner who understands your industry and its specific challenges to help you tackle them effectively.

Implementing a successful multi-cloud strategy requires careful planning, robust governance processes, and the right tools and expertise to manage the ever-increasing complexity effectively.

Benefits of a Multi-Cloud Strategy

• Avoid Vendor Lock-In: By using services from multiple providers, organizations can avoid being locked into a single vendor's ecosystem.
• Best-in-Class Services: Different cloud providers excel at different services. A multi-cloud approach allows organizations to leverage the strengths of each provider for specific workloads or use cases.
• Improved Reliability and Disaster Recovery: Distributing workloads across multiple clouds can enhance availability and provide better disaster recovery options in case of outages or failures with a single provider.
• Cost Optimization: Organizations can take advantage of pricing differences between providers and leverage the most cost-effective solutions for different workloads.
• Compliance and Data Sovereignty: A multi-cloud strategy can help organizations meet regulatory requirements and data sovereignty laws by deploying workloads in specific regions or cloud environments.

Partnering with a reliable managed cloud service provider will maximize the potential of available resources and reduce the operational load on your internal IT team.

Usually, organizations adopt one of the following strategies:

• Setting up their own cloud competence centre. This means hiring experienced professionals and developing a training program for existing staff. The key questions to consider beforehand are: How long will it take to build a project team assigned to perform the assessment? How high is the risk of not having or finding the right people? How hard will it be to retain trained staff? How do we continue to maintain skills as hyperscalers innovate?
• Choosing the “build-migrate-transfer strategy”. In this scenario, a partner advisor is assigned to provide an assessment of the current technology landscape, create a migration strategy and execute the migration following best practices and transfer the operational model to the customer, if necessary. With this strategy, the transition to the cloud is faster and you still have the option to take over the core operational elements once the initial phase is complete. If the need arises, the managed service provider can quickly be brought back on board to provide ongoing cloud and application managed services or their expertise for future projects.
• Managed cloud services. Here, a partner takes over the migration and operation of the infrastructure. This strategy is particularly beneficial to organizations dealing with scarce in-house IT resources and wanting to move to the cloud as quickly as possible. Similar to the first scenario, it is recommended to establish a cloud competence centre in order to identify opportunities offered by cloud transformation, act as an intermediary ambassador to the business units, and to manage relationships with service providers. Additionally, the cloud provider may assist in establishing the Cloud Competence Center of Excellence (CCoE), which aims to manage cloud operations, track the innovation offered by hyperscalers, and update architecture, process, and operations based on business requirements.

A combination of all three models is also possible to accommodate different criticalities or applications.

Security policies and individual compliance regulations required by your organization should be an integral part of your cloud governance from the very start of the project and should be reviewed on an ongoing basis. Here are some of the key recommendations that you should follow:

• Make sure you involve your Chief Security Officer or Data Security Officer right from the beginning. Their insights are invaluable for key governance, management, monitoring, auditability, and observability of the environment.
• Identify compliance requirements that apply to your organization in relation to the selected cloud provider and the established operation. Analyze available tools and compliance certifications.
• Review your access management processes focusing on such areas as: Zero-Trust security, Identity and Access Management (IAM), multi-factor identification, role-based access control, and clean auditing and monitoring processes.
• To save time and increase security, validate and implement your own ideas with an experienced consulting partner or a professional cloud service provider. Hyperscaler approved and recommended well-architected reviews are typically offered. For many industries and applications, there are corresponding best practice examples available on the respective platforms.
• Challenge your existing requirements. The cloud often offers better and easier ways to achieve improved results! A 1:1 implementation of on-premises technologies is not practical and can increase complexity without adding value.

Cloud services are simple to consume, but they need a precise operational model with clear responsibilities and transparent cost management. Following a move to the cloud many organizations realize that they didn’t implement the right cost visibility and governance for their new IT environment. They struggle with internal cost allocation, and can face questions such as:

• What cost allocation is generated by various departments (HR, IT, Finance, Legal, etc.)
• What are we paying for our production and non-production environments?
• What is our all-in cost for each specific service, virtual machine, workload or landscape?

Many of these challenges can be solved by integrating FinOps best practices – an operational framework that helps to maximize the financial value of the cloud. An experienced cloud service provider will not only fully leverage the framework to optimize existing cloud infrastructure but also equip the organization with relevant reports and visibility that aligns with their business and provides a detailed overview of all spending.

More information about FinOps can be found here.

Operational efficiency in the cloud is another overlooked aspect that involves following the guidelines of Operational Excellence. It aims for automation and efficiency, setting guardrails for security and compliance as well as establishing the processes for ongoing maintenance and optimization, ensuring that the right governance model is implemented and followed.

To innovate on the public cloud, you can leverage several key services and strategies:

• 1. Adopt serverless computing: Serverless services allow you to focus on writing code and building applications without managing infrastructure. This approach enables faster development cycles and easier scaling of innovative solutions.
• 2. Leverage containerization: On-demand containers provide a flexible and efficient way to package and deploy applications, allowing for easier portability and consistency across different environments.
• 3. Embrace cloud-native technologies: Take advantage of cloud-specific services like managed databases, AI/ML platforms, and IoT services to build innovative solutions more quickly.
• 4. Implement DevOps practices: Utilize cloud-based CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code to streamline development and deployment processes.
• 5. Explore data analytics and AI services: Many public cloud providers offer advanced analytics and machine learning services that can help derive insights and create intelligent applications.
• 6. Experiment with emerging technologies such as GenAI to optimize business outcomes responsibly and securely.

One of the primary obstacles organizations face when planning their move to the cloud is the lack of relevant expertise and the problem of retaining it. Without a comprehensive understanding of all available public cloud services, their strategies often overlook innovative solutions, use cases, operational efficiencies, and potential cost optimizations for their dynamic IT environments. A robust strategy should also address future governance models for the new infrastructure. For instance, when designing a public cloud environment for the entire organization with multiple departments, considerations include ensuring appropriate levels of control, defining roles for creating new accounts, and structuring the account hierarchy.

To revitalize your current cloud strategy and sidestep these pitfalls, here are essential best practices to guide you: Developing Your Cloud Strategy: 6 Best Practices